Definition
A Law French preposition meaning "with." In medieval English legal records and Year Books, ove functions as the equivalent of the Modern French avec and the English preposition "with." It appears most commonly in procedural and pleading contexts to indicate association or alignment — particularly to identify the party on whose side a judgment was rendered or with whom a person stood in a legal proceeding.
The term also carries a secondary sense of "for," a usage Burrill traces to the old books and illustrates with the phrase "Yaxley qui fuit ove le plaintiff" — meaning Yaxley who was with (or for) the plaintiff.
Common Confusion
OVE and OVEL are visually similar in older printed sources and in manuscript, but they are unrelated in meaning. Ove is a preposition ("with," "for"); ovel is an adjective meaning "equal." The derived form ovelment means "equally." Researchers who encounter ovel or owel in a partition or dower context should consult the entry for OWELTY, which survives into modern property law as a recognized doctrine.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in Year Books, early plea rolls, or any pre-modern English legal record will encounter ove with some regularity. Its principal importance is contextual: because it can mean either "with" or "for," misreading it can invert the meaning of a passage describing whose side prevailed or who aligned with whom in a proceeding. The phrase "judgment fuit done ove le plaintiff" means judgment was given for the plaintiff — a reading that would be obscured if ove were translated only as the neutral preposition "with."
Law French generally presents this ambiguity problem across many prepositions and connectives that do not map cleanly onto modern English equivalents. Ove is a minor but representative example. Researchers should read it in context and resist defaulting to a single English gloss.
The closely associated term OVEL (also rendered OWEL) appears immediately in the sources and should not be confused with ove. Ovel means "equal" and is the root of terms like "owelty" still found in modern conveyancing contexts. The visual similarity between ove and ovel in manuscript sources can cause misreadings.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (2nd Ed.) offers only a spare entry: "L Fr. With. Modern French avec." Burrill is more instructive, providing the dual sense ("with" and "for"), two illustrative quotations from Keilway and Dyer, and an immediate cross-reference to OVEL. Burrill's treatment reflects the practical reality that Law French prepositions were used loosely and that understanding their range is more useful than fixing a single translation.
Neither source dwells on ove at length, which is appropriate given its function as a grammatical particle rather than a legal concept. Both sources agree on the primary meaning; Burrill alone captures the secondary usage that is most likely to cause interpretive difficulty.